


seen the future, brother

by lastwingedthing



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003), Generation Kill
Genre: F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-06
Updated: 2010-07-06
Packaged: 2017-10-10 10:31:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastwingedthing/pseuds/lastwingedthing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ray Person, after the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	seen the future, brother

**Author's Note:**

> I can't explain all of these crossovers, I really can't. Or all the genderswap in this one, for that matter. Well, it worked for Starbuck and Boomer!
> 
> Thanks, as usual, to K for looking over everything. Title is from Leonard Cohen.
> 
>  
> 
> **Contains potentially disturbing/triggering content: see the end notes for more detail.**

Out in the black, Ray dreams of the desert. Dreams of stone and heat and the blue-black sky, the howling dust-filled winds, the emptiness and the frigid starlit nights. Which is ridiculous, really. He’s a Tauron boy sure, but a farming boy, a country boy out from the wheat belt where clouds formed and rain fell, as predictable as winter. For all those long years he was stationed on his home planet he’d hated the desert. Too dry, too quiet, too empty; he’d lived for the training exercises that had gotten them off the dirtside camps and out into the crowded, noisy, living ships.

Sweet irony. Home’s gone and the deserts are burning, and Ray’s never getting off this frakking ship. Or at least, not until the Cylons catch up again and blow them all into frozen chunks drifting off through the night. Which will most likely be in a couple of weeks, but who cares, right? These days that’s the closest thing to forever you can get.

Forever ago, his platoon was taking a shuttle back from leave in the city, skimming across empty desert while they joked and frakked around. Then the bombs had fallen, and the world had ended, and now they were left alive on the only Battlestar left in the universe.

They train because it’s all they have. They have duties, guarding and patrols, but it burns in them all that they _can’t_ fight the real battles, the ones that steal the lives of pilots every week. There’s no use in sending Marines out into the black alone. No solid ground to fight from.

So Ray guards, and drinks, and plays cards, and gets in fights. One week he’ll frak anything that looks at him right, and the next he’ll hiss and spit when Brad so much as brushes against him with her fingertips. Fick goes rigid and unyielding, drilling them all for twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch until even they are begging her for mercy. Trombley loses an eye on the flight deck one night – equipment’s old and faulty, no-one to blame, no reason why Ray can’t forget his shock and disbelieving tears. Lilley pretends nothing’s happening, drives them all crazy with that fucking camera, but at night they find her crying herself sick over that last letter from her wife. Wynn does okay, stays calm and jokes around to keep everyone’s spirits up, until the morning he locks himself into the head and blows his brains out across the mirrors and the water and the rusting metal floor.

***

One of the priests comes by their quarters to hold a service for the dead. Ray holds up as best he can through all the empty words about afterlives and resurrection, but his breath sticks in his throat until he’s choking and silenced. Bullshit, he thinks, frakking bullshit.

It’s Poke that stands up in the middle of the priest’s speech and sends the room quiet. Poke, whose wife and daughters are lost on the dead worlds, Gina, little Sara, Lacey who had learned to surf with her daddy that summer. Poke doesn’t smile anymore. Poke never really talks.

“Frak that,” he said. “There’s no life after death. No frakking fairytales.” He shakes his head, cold and hard. “All we got is vengeance.”

“Blood for Ares,” Doc says, nodding. “All we got is rage.”

Ray’s nodding his head with them, feeling the rightness of it down to his bones. Half the room stands with them then, ignores the priest and prays to the god of war. Ray has known the words to these prayers since he learned to speak. His Gramma was a proper Tauron, taught him about bloodshed, about revenge.

But afterwards he feels drained and empty, hollowed out by his rage. He wants – he wants a cigarette, Blue Shepherd brand, but there are none left in the universe. He wants to go to a bar in the city and eat a good meal, drink real beer, frak a girl he’s never seen before. He wants everything, his mama, his granddaddy, the first boy who fucked him back in eleventh grade. The long hot summer days you got in the territory, air dancing over the bone-dry grass, and the way the air felt cool and sodden after the first rains. That Tauron bar he visited the night before he enlisted and every year since then, the old metal bunks at the barracks at Pendleton that creaked every time someone breathed, the tiny apartment he’d rented with Brad for six months on Leonis with its peeling paint and view of the whole city lit up at night, beautiful enough to break your heart. A town, a city, a province, a planet; he wants everything.

Everything is gone.  

***

He goes to Brad in the end, starts sparring with her in a deserted storage room. It’s pretty futile; either Brad wins in seconds or she lets Ray win, and either way he still feels like shit afterwards. But punching feels good, and getting punched back feels even better. Brad knows it, and grins with bared teeth and blood smeared on her cheek as she pins Ray down again and again.

They frak right there on the floor afterwards, metal cold and hard on Ray’s bruises. Back on Tauron they talked about getting married, sometimes – well, Brad was spiky and defensive and vulnerable, but Ray had talked, and Brad had smiled and never told him no. After they’d done their time – why not? They’d never know anyone the way they knew each other.

Ray’s still going spend the rest of his life with her. All the weeks and days and hours they have left, counting out each breath, trapped in these ships until breath runs out. The rest of their lives spent in this long night that will never end.

Every night Ray dreams of the desert, and the silence outside.

**Author's Note:**

> Contains the graphic suicide of a minor character.


End file.
